Wanna Be Famous? Science Says Get There By Age 30

Matthew Herper
,
Forbes Staff
I cover science and medicine, and believe this is biology's century.

Jean-Baptiste Michel

Today, Forbes is unveiling our 30 Under 30 project, which lists 30 rising stars in a dozen different fields including music, science, and social media. You might think that this is just a case of a bunch of journalists trying to come up with a snappy headline. But there is scientific proof that if you want to become famous, your odds start dropping after age 30.

I didn't realize this when I started reporting this project, of course. It took one of the brilliant minds on our list of 30 scientists and innovators under 30 to make me see the true importance of this age, which I, unfortunately, passed three years ago.

"You seem worried that 30 is an arbitrary age!" wrote Jean-Baptiste Michel, a fellow at Harvard University and visiting faculty at Google. "Not to worry, we can help justify this seemingly random choice!"

Michel, 29, and his collaborator, Erez Lieberman Aiden, also of Harvard, have been making headlines from their use of powerful computational algorithms to data-mine archives of books, encyclopedia volumes, and dictionaries going back centuries. And that work does seem to show that, increasingly, half the people who will become famous have done so by the time the hit 30.

It is probably worth noting that Lieberman Aiden, 31, had some objections. He wrote:

I am 'under 30' in a number of interesting respects. For instance, I am under 30 feet tall. I have under 30 papers (surely a measure of academic age) and fewer than 30 tree rings (none in fact). I have lived in under 30 cities, and some nights I sleep for under 30 minutes. Other nights I sleep for under 30 hours. Anyway, if you plan on producing lists with those cutoff criteria, I'm your man.

Nice try, Erez, but you can't argue with your own data. In an article Michel and Lieberman Aiden published in the January 14 2011 issue of Science, one of the top research journals, they used a database of 4% of all the books ever printed between 1800 and 2000 to show how grammar, censorship practices, and the rate at which new technologies are adopted over time. They also looked at famous people, in a section cleverly titled, "'In the future, everyone will be famous for 7.5minutes' – Whatshisname."

Their method was to take 740,000 people with entries on Wikipedia and create birth cohorts for famous people born in every year between 1800 and 1950. For instance, the 1882 cohort includes Virginia Woolf and Felix Frankfurter; the 1946 one includes Steven Spielberg and Bill Clinton. In every year, there is a similar trend, with half of the famous people getting that way by relatively young age, seeing their fame (measured by the number of times they are mentioned in books) increase rather dramatically, and then seeing that celebrity wane as time passes and they age and die.

But as time has passed, the median age at which people become famous has been dropping. (The median is the middle value; half the celebrities are older than this, and half of them are younger.) In the early 1800s, the average famous person became well known at age 43. By 1864, fame came at age 34, and by the mid-20th century it had dropped all the way to 29 – which explains why so many celebrities these days seem to have only recently abandoned diapers.

However, the age at which a person became famous varied according to his or her profession. Actors have always become famous at the youngest age, followed by writers (maybe I have a little time left). Politicians don't become famous until their 50s. (Look how quickly Barack Obama went from relative unknown to commander-in-chief.) And science is, in Michel and Lieberman's words, "a poor route to fame." Biologists and physicists became as famous as actors, but it took them a very long time. Mathematicians did not become famous, because you, dear reader, would rather read about Angelina Jolie than Andrew Wiles. The people on our list of scientists and innovators are playing the fame game with a handicap.

A big caveat: All of the books used in this analysis predate the Internet and the rise of television, both of which probably changed how people become famous. (I mean, look at Kim Kardashian.) Writes Michel: "Clearly, more research is needed."